Today Take-home exercise The role of evidence from dialect geography in the debate between Neogrammarian and lexically-diffusing change -- “Chaque mot a son histoire” (Charmey) -- Lexically-diffusing change and the GVS (Ogura) -- Short (a)-tensing in Philadelphia A resolution to the paradox

1. “Chaque mot a son histoire” 1.) We learn that the concensus among early lexical diffusionists, such as Gauchat, was that the facts of dialect geography did not support Neogrammarian exceptionlessness. a.) Summarize the findings and significance of Gauchat's Charmey study (this will require returning to chapters 3,4 for details of the study) NGs overestimated the unity of speech communities problem of explaining how we deal with the question of uniformity within and between speakers A troubling tale?

1. “Chaque mot a son histoire” b.) State why dialect geography was felt to provide counterevidence for Neogrammarian sound change (hint: 2 reasons) 2.) Why did Kiparsky, a generative phonologist (working in the framework of lexical phonology), reason that language contact/diversity in no way disconfirms exceptionlessness? What lead him to argue that "any borrowing hypothesis must fit the known dialectological and sociolinguistic realities (p. 474)?" Reason 1: (p. 474) Sound change is a change in a speaker’s manner of pronouncing a phoneme Reason 2: isoglosses rarely coincide... linguistic regularities must be theorized in a way that takes into account social regularities neither underestimating or overestimating them. Cyclicity supported socially and linguistically.

4. Resolution to the paradox 3.) Labov's proposed solution to the regularity question is to accept that both lexical diffusion and exceptionless sound change may be intimately involved in sound change. Rather than simply taking "the middle road", he proposes that these two mechanisms operate at different times, and display different properties. a.) When is each mechanism predicted to apply? b.) What are the properties of both types of sound change? c.) Do you feel this proposal is well-motivated, or a "cop-out"?